Action, Brazil

Brazil leads way in Latin America in taking Syrian Refugees

ASSOCIATED PRESS (AP)
By Stan Lehman

In this May 15, 2015 photo, Syrian refugee Abdulhannan Mouhammed, second from left, attends Friday prayer at a mosque in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Two years after the Syrian civil war broke out, Brazil adopted measures that made it easier for Syrians to be granted refugee status. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
In this May 15, 2015 photo, Syrian refugee Abdulhannan Mouhammed, second from left, attends Friday prayer at a mosque in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Two years after the Syrian civil war broke out, Brazil adopted measures that made it easier for Syrians to be granted refugee status. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

SAO PAULO (AP) — The comfortable life Muna Hassan Derweech and her family enjoyed in the Syrian port city of Latakia collapsed in 2013 amid civil war.

Now, she, her husband and their four children have joined nearly 2,000 other Syrians trying to make a new life in Brazil, which has accepted more Syrians fleeing the violence at home than any other nation in the Americas with the exception of Canada. In comparison, the United States has taken in about 650 Syrian refugees, according to the International Rescue Committee.

Derweech recently reminisced about her life while selling homemade Syrian food outside the mosque of Sao Paulo’s Beneficent Muslim Society.

“We lived very well in Latakia,” she said. “We owned a four-bedroom house and my husband earned well working as a marine mechanical engineer and I worked as a schoolteacher. But the war, the killings and the horrible violence destroyed all that.”  More…